Listen to a cool song about corn. Thank you to my friend Julie for sharing it with me, and to songwriter-comic-singer-poet-musician Heywood Banks for giving me permission to post it here. Check out heywoodbanks.com for more info.

“If you build it, they will come.” Perhaps the most famous movie involving corn and Iowa is the 1989 hit Field of Dreams. Starring Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones, Burt Lancaster, Amy Madigan and Ray Liotta, the film was nominated for an Oscar, a Grammy and a bunch of other stuff but didn’t win. However it did win “Best Foreign Film” in the Awards of the Japanese Academy.

In 1977, author Steven King published a short story called Children of the Corn in a magazine. The story was adapted into a short film called Disciples of the Corn in 1983. A year later, it morphed into a larger-budget film and resumed using the original name. There were 6 sequels (the sixth one known as Children of the Corn 666) and later, a made-for-TV movie.

Parts of the movie were filmed in Iowa, and it was subsequently released in about a dozen other countries. (In Germany, it was called Kinder des Zorns; in Mexico, it was Los Ninos del Maiz.)

Percy Faith was a Canadian-born bandleader, orchestrator and composer probably best known for recording the most popular rendition of Theme from A Summer Place. The song was written for the 1959 movie A Summer Place, which starred Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue. Percy’s version of the theme spent 9 consecutive weeks atop the Billboard charts in 1960, and won a Grammy for Record of the Year.

So what’s this got to do with corn? Well, his orchestra also recorded a version of the Iowa Corn Song. That song originated in 1912, when a group of Za-Ga-Zig Shriners from Des Moines traveled to Los Angeles, and needed an exciting song that promoted Iowa’s chief crop. While it’s not the official song of Iowa, it is well known throughout the state (especially if you’re over age 60).